


Thermaplugg and the Machine

by lorenerd13



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Kink Meme, Prompt Fill, Warcraft Kink Meme, boundaries: some gnomes do not grok them, did you know that ‘subtext’ is an anagram for ‘buttsex’?, gnomes are utterly ludicrous fun, not so friendly rivalry, obviously an alternate universe lead-in to becoming the final boss of Gnomeregan, rhetorical question: why are megalomaniacs so great to write?, there may or may not be subtext, unfortunately I am a tease and there is no buttsex in this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-16 21:55:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10580259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorenerd13/pseuds/lorenerd13
Summary: Written for a Warcraft Kink Meme prompt requesting Thermaplugg, a machine that vibrates, and an interruption by someone (Gelbin Mekkatorque) who doesn't necessarily understand what he's seeing.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to a certain mad gnome for the gnomish equivalent of sad kitten eyes and other details; I knew I could count on you.
> 
> Full prompt:  
> "Please? No need to make it graphic but there's a serious lack of anything regarding Gnomes in general and I think that this character in particular has some real potential.  
> Maybe alone he vents his frustration by building things- then realizes he kind of likes the way one particular mech he's been working on vibrates..
> 
> No angst needed, just a rather troubled little Gnome having a bit of fun with his machines.  
> Bonus if someone walks in and doesn't realize what's really going on. *Cough*GelbinMekkatorque*Cough*  
> Bonus bonus ifthe fic is touched with a healthy degree of humour."
> 
> Anon who prompted this silliness, I hope this fulfills your request.

The mech won’t work. Sicco is tempted, so tempted, to express his frustration with some percussive therapy. Except it would only make him feel better and it wouldn’t do a blasted thing to get this future masterpiece moving. And if he were to bend his best arclight spanner out of shape? Well, then he’d be up in the air without any rocket boots. No, he’s got to apply his (admittedly) massive intellect to this issue until he once again proves his mastery over his own creation. Everything has a solution, even if that solution is flesh-eating acid.

It could, of course, be mocking him. In which case it absolutely deserves the beating he so dearly wants to give it.

No, no. Sicco takes a shaky breath. This needs to be perfect, and it needs to be done so he can show it to the voting public so they’ll finally give him some of the accolades he richly deserves and quit ignoring him in favor of Gelbin. Don’t get him wrong, he loves Gelbin the way few gnomes not related by the vagaries of genetics can, but sometimes it’s a little hard to bear. A Sicco Thermaplugg appreciation month would be just about perfect.

That thought buoys him enough to clamber up on top and rummage around in the colorful nest of wires that the main control board will slot over once he gets them sorted to his satisfaction. He’s gone over this a good three hundred twelve times; he’s counted each attempt and still there’s a wire crossed somewhere that he can’t find. Once more his mental weighing scales tip over towards going full orc on this hack job.

“Is this her?” calls an awed voice from somewhere on ground level.

Sicco’s load-bearing arm gives out in his surprise and he goes face-first onto the floor plate by the command chair’s swivel track. Whatever he smacked into on the way down, though, it made the short not matter for a single glorious second because his mech chugs to life with a healthy roar. Never mind that she’s not ready for the general public, let alone his friendly rival Gelbin! He lays there, stunned physically and mentally, unable to come up with a response that won’t be taken the wrong way.

There’s a scrabbling noise and Gelbin’s head peeks over from the back of the mech. He’s touching Sicco’s baby, he’s not supposed to be touching her!

“Hey, you all right?” Gelbin says over the engine, though clearly his attention is on the sleek lines and the inherent wrongness of the open space where the panel will go.

Sicco wheezes something that arguably could be “I’m fine” or “Get zapped” depending on your hearing acuity. He’s trying with all his might to kickstart his thought processes again so he can explain just how invasive and wrong this is without Gelbin looking at him with his goggles set to Sad Googly Eyes. For one thing, that setting is more deserving of the appellation “creepy” than “pitiful.”

Having assured himself that Sicco isn’t experiencing electrocution-induced cardiac arrest, Gelbin peers intently at everything in view for a long interval before hooking his leg over the side and perching on the lip around where the protective bubble will go. “She’s a beaut,” he says.

Sicco agrees, of course: it’s everything his fevered brain dreamed up during adolescence, when a young gnome’s mind turns to thoughts of _building_ and _explosions_ and _setting his enemies on fire with thermite_. But now he’s itching to do deep-level diagnostics to find out just what got flipped to make her start running after accidental percussive therapy. The experiment is worth very little if he can’t replicate the results, after all. He just can’t perform at his best with an audience. Not when someone keeps interrupting his thoughts—

“May I?” Gelbin gestures at the command chair, locked in its furthest-away position while the circuit boards got soldered up and the wiring installed.

Sicco opens his mouth to say no, but the presumptive ass has already thrown himself into it and is poking at the buttons on the armrest with no heed for whether they’re designed to deliver a payload or douse an intruder in highly flammable oil. He should know better than to mess with another gnome’s setup during construction stages; it’s a perfect way to get them both killed.

The chair thrums. The bolts hold at least but it’s yet another item to iron out during the testing phase. The shaking gives Gelbin’s voice that funny buzzing quality children find hilarious when he asks, “A massage chair? Fabulous idea when you get the execution down; I’m glad you listened to my advice about working too hard.”

For a second, Sicco greatly regrets not installing an ejector seat. What does he look like though, a goblin? Not his style.

Gelbin pounds another button, entirely missing his friend’s wince. Prototypes can be delicate! And Gelbin’s eyes go wide enough that the magnification of his goggles’ lenses size them up to doubly ludicrous. Which is enough to tell Sicco which button he engaged. The one that slides open a trapdoor in the soft snow leopard leather seat cushion and thrusts up a...a thing. That he found in a catalogue of _specialty items_. Sold as quote-unquote novelties so the authorities don’t get the wrong kind of ideas that twist the ol’ mental wiring, because then it becomes an exhausting inquiry on multiple levels.

_Don’t look down, don’t look down, don’t look down_ , shrieks the klaxon in Sicco’s head. Gelbin looks down. One of the whirligigs on his goggles begins to spin at a prodigious rate but at least it makes it clear that he doesn’t comprehend what he’s looking at. Thank the master schematics for small miracles.

“So, uh, a mini-massager, huh?” Gelbin asks. Or not.

He indulges the wish for one bright second that he’d thought to install a trapdoor so he could sink through it in complete humiliation. Not that he can’t still make it happen, but it doesn’t solve the problem that’s occurring in the present moment. In a less conspicuously embarrassing situation, like when he finally debuts it for the general public, he could use it to rise triumphantly from within the mech to the crescendoing wave of awed murmurs and slowly building thunderous applause.

He shouldn’t need to reply but there are forms, and societies run on various scripts; and so, “Yes, Gelbin, it’s a mini-massager.” One of these days, withering sarcasm will win the battle when nothing else does.

To his horror, Gelbin takes that as an invitation to overshare more and, even worse, he starts off detailing how sore his keister gets from sitting in a command chair for too many hours at a time plus the various home remedies he’s attempted and it’s simply too much. He’ll never live this down and Gelbin will look at him with those knowing eyes forever.

“Gelbin.” It doesn’t even slow him down. “Gelbin!” Finally, he stops running his mouth while staring at the thing poking up out of the secret compartment and fixes those magnified eyes on Sicco. It’s starting to feel like he’s exposed a child to something inappropriate. “It’s not ready yet and you’re adding variables to the testing phase. It can’t move to the production phase like this,” Sicco explains.

“Oh. Ohhh. I thought maybe you...needed some help.” Gelbin makes a rather helpless gesture that seems to encompass loneliness and a desire to help plus a bit of hurt feelings that he wasn’t asked to come assist in the first place.

Great, now he feels bad for alerting Gelbin to his discomfort. Looks like it’s time to invest some mental energy in creating a locking mechanism that even a publicly accorded mega-genius inventor like Gelbin wouldn’t be able to crack; build a better mecharodent, as they say. With a rolling password reset that jumps to harder and harder to crack encyrption modules every time an incorrect input is made. Yes! He should write this down—

Oh, but Gelbin is still here and still giving him that hang-dog expression. Sicco’s gone and forgotten some of the script, hasn’t he? He runs back over the last couple of minutes three times before it clonks him in the face like a falling spanner. A lump rises in his throat. “Gelbin, listen, I swear on my favorite toolbox I’ll call you when it’s ready for you to come help me. You’re the best at getting through those final stages when everything would rather blow up than work in harmony; you know that. I’d be a fool to forget about you.”

“Do you really mean that or are you saying it to get me to leave you in peace?”

A lot of distinctly inappropriate phrases run through Sicco’s head at this juncture. He does not say any of them. His life might go so much more easily if he were a mechanical construct instead of flesh and blood, though. “Of course I really mean it!”

“But you never want to buddy up for projects...”

Oh, for the love of pencils and draft paper. “I never want to buddy up for projects because I lose ideas waiting for the other guy to finish talking. That’s why I always tap _you_ for the final stages.”

Gelbin looks a little taken aback at that but finally gives a slow nod like the concept takes time to be digested. He starts hunting for the control to return the command chair to its previous configuration.

“Third green glowy button left of the blue square one that says ‘don’t even think about it,’” Sicco supplies helpfully.

He can’t hear the _click-whirr_ of the chair returning to its previous configuration but he sees the confirmation lights turning off to mark it. With that sop to his vanity, maybe Gelbin will leave him in peace for a few minutes. Verbal confirmation it’ll have to be.

“Now please, just be quiet,” Sicco begs. _For the love of the spirit of engineering, be quiet._

“You mean I can watch?” Excitable as a noble gas, that Gelbin.

“If you’re _quiet_ ,” and he emphasizes the word enough that it’s ludicrous.

Gelbin subsides, watching with bright, interested eyes. He also holds mostly still, evidently serious about complying with Sicco’s directives for quite possibly the first time ever.

Sicco tinkers in silence for a few blessed minutes, refraining from muttering to himself as is his usual wont. Attempt number three hundred thirteen and he’s still no closer to unraveling the short, though of course he found some rubberized gloves so stray current doesn’t go to ground right through him and end his career with a lot of twitching and singed hair.

“Oh, uh, Sicco?” Gelbin pipes up.

He has several wires clamped between his teeth and he’s dangling face first in the wires that are more like a patch of electrified briars at this point. “What?” he says tiredly through the mouthful. It comes out more like “Uhhh?”

A few seconds of silence brings Gelbin off the command chair and over by him. He’d known it couldn’t last but he’d hoped. “I think the polarity on your spanner got reversed, and I’d bet it’s what made her so reluctant to power up before this,” he says conversationally. Is he truly so oblivious that he doesn’t notice the insult to Sicco’s prowess? But he’ll never let up until he’s demonstrably proven wrong, so Sicco flips open the panel on his best spanner to wave it in Gelbin’s face when the truth is revealed.

It’s been flipped to positive. How long has it been configured like that?!

“No wonder,” Sicco breathes.

Somewhere in the background Gelbin is telling a convoluted story about how the same thing happened to _him_ recently and he didn’t discover it for blah, blah, blah. His voice recedes as Sicco goes back through those three hundred flipping twelve attempts to get the mech working. Had he even checked it in the last year?

“...and you should always check your tools before you begin any work; I know you get worked up when the urge seizes you but hey, everyone needs a refresher on the basics sometimes,” Gelbin finishes.

Sicco sighs. It’s going to be a long night with Gelbin triple-checking his work but he’ll never get loose now. And Sicco could have used a session in the massage chair, alone with his thoughts, with just the humming of the machinery to lull him into a more positive mood. This right here is precisely why he prefers to work out his mechanical woes on his own. He resigns himself to his fate—for now.

**Author's Note:**

> [Edited to add some spelling, hyphenation, and other fixes on 12/31/17 because I found a copy of the fic with notes that hadn't gotten into the already posted version, whoops. If you're waiting for that promised update on "Reach Out and Touch Someone," it's coming: I typed up a bunch of edits on it tonight as well, so cross your fingers that next year is better for me finishing and posting things.]


End file.
